How NIBCO implemented SAP NetWeaver BW on IBM servers to improve productivity, profitability.

NIBCO INC. manufactures plumbing valves, fittings and flow control solutions for commercial and industrial markets, headquartered in El...

NIBCO INC. manufactures plumbing valves, fittings and flow control solutions for commercial and industrial markets, headquartered in Elkhart,Indiana,USA. As the ongoing volatility of global economic events presents new challenges for manufacturers, NIBCO places a strong focus on continuous innovation and improvement in order to maintain its leadership position in the industry. NIBCO has been taking advantage of integrated SAP ERP applications to optimize its operations for more than fifteen years. The company runs every aspect of its business on SAP ERP solutions, from warehouse management and production planning right through to product pricing and financial management. SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) acts as the central data warehouse for the huge volumes of information generated by NIBCO’s SAP ERP applications. The company uses SAP NetWeaver BW to provide a centralized platform for storing, consolidating and analyzing approximately 3 TB of data, which is growing at a rate of 30 percent each year. Fast, accurate insight into its business to help spot trends early on, enables NIBCO to design more desirable products and fine-tune production. To solve its information challenge, NIBCO implemented the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator, running on an IBM BladeCenter H chassis equipped with IBM BladeCenter HS22 servers. The company previously took more than 17 minutes to drill down into a single customer’s historical orders, however with SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator they could do the same in just over a minute, which was an improvement of 92 percent. This kind of agility allowed NIBCO to gain a much deeper understanding of their own performance, so they could run the business more productively and profitably.